The End of History
A New Year’s Resolution
New years are marked by a hope in the new to do something that the old didn’t and, perhaps, couldn’t. This collective, unequivocal acceptance that, in order to proceed in time, what’s required is a complete break from the past is sincerely profound. Rarely is it acknowledged that the metaphysical lesson being taught all of the time — whether in the transition from one year to another or from the ambiguity of life to the certitude of death — is that rupture is unavoidable and necessary to progression. There is no way out but through. For most of us, it’s the most clarity we’ll ever have about what it takes to usher in new worlds and ways of being. It’s socially and politically acceptable to pretend that the end of an undesirable world can be achieved by making compromises and adjustments to it. In reality, it just needs to end.
The unwillingness to embrace the rupture is due to the attachment to historical consciousness. As a documentation of past events which so often reconfigure and reemerge, history is indispensable for its ability to explain the present. But, as Grant Farred observes, historical consciousness often becomes an irrational fidelity to practices that, may have yielded concessions and marginal victories, but no concrete transformations. To be less abstract about it - pedestaling history has resulted in obsessing over and praising the endless pursuit of political objects like “redress,” “freedom,” “justice,” and “progress” without ever actually waging war against the intractability of antiblackness which has rendered their attainment impossible. We would rather have the sentimental confinement of nostalgia allowing us to perpetually imagine ourselves as the legacy of greats who fought all the important wars than the courage to realize that the old have passed away and the subjugation remains. Instead of the future, history becomes the horizon of political imagination and, in turn, a particularly formidable form of cultural hegemony. This is why we live in a society more willing to commemorate and reflect than take seriously new strategies of abolition. Going to war means, at the very least, relentlessly critiquing the insufficiency of the compromises that have been made and being willing to develop new forms of fighting.
The predominance of historical consciousness also distorts our understanding of and relationship to time. It encourages narratives of linearity - ideas that historical events unfolded because they were somehow inevitable - and discourages narratives of dimensionality - flexible conceptions that acknowledge history is shaped by things like region, international context, proximity to historical failure, ideological trends, technological innovations, etc. A dimension is a dynamic, comprehensive form of measurement that allows for and makes sense of unpredictable outcomes. It necessitates thinking expansively, rather than narrowly, about how what is has come to be. A dimension is not a line.
As a romantic with a high tolerance for cliches, the convention of the “New Year’s Resolution” strikes me as a useful political proposition - how much longer will we spend fighting for history instead of ontology? Recovering the past instead of exposing the limits of state-sanctioned redress that persist as impediments to the free existence of our own selves? “Do you see the beauty in [finding the exit plan]?” Joy James asks. “It’s an impossible task, but it’s one completely worthy of you. Which is why you’re doing it anyway.”